We greatly need to understand that our meeting with [God] is not only a future but also a present event.---He is the Silent Partner in all our upward struggles. He is the Inevitable Factor with which we must reckon in all our considerations. He is the Absolute Quantity to which we must relate ourselves, and to whose standards we must conform.---We are the children of One who takes into consideration but one tense. His word is _NOW_. Virtue It is the fact that love is so constituted that it finds joy in bearing burdens. Love is the sweetest and the costliest thing in the world. It is the sweetest because it is the spirit and atmosphere of heaven. It is the costliest because its arms are always aching for loads to carry. When we fail in a righteous cause the labor has not necessarily been in vain. One can never be robbed of the best fruit of his striving, which is the added sinew of strength gained in the trying. One of the strongest forces now making for a day of lasting peace is the beautiful suggestion that comes from the spirit of those who make it their aim to help while others destroy. The hardy virtues that make good men are the foundation stones upon which any sound national life must be built.---[National life] is, therefore, more largely dependent upon Christian agencies than upon any other one influence. Responsibility is a wonderful tonic. The ideal of Jesus will remain unrealized until men have learned to accept his words at their face value, and to act upon the assumption that they are true. Faith knows no other testimony so worthy as that of obedience. Laziness is often a harder taskmaster than industry, and sin is always a harder taskmaster than righteousness. The habit of being real deserves a place among the chiefest of all virtues.---We can no more outgrow the necessity for truth and honor than we can outdistance that for plain living and high thinking. The only proper standard is rightness. It is a poor thing to be in fashion if the fashion is wrong. ...the man himself must not forget that what he can do and what he will do are entirely determined by what he is.---One may stand upon artificial good behavior for an hour or a day, but he cannot do it permanently without the staying force of a fixed principle. It takes more than good resolutions to make an ethical life.